Week Two!

End of week 2 in Rwanda! It’s crazy that tomorrow we’ll have been here for two weeks.  Sometimes it feels like we just got here, and other times it feels like we’ve been here forever.  Saturday and Monday of this past week, we visited some genocide memorials, which was really tough.  Saturday we went to a place in Kigali which was more of a museum telling about the genocide and then also mass graves.  Monday we visited two churches which were actual places where many people died.  The churches were filled with clothing from victims and you could see bullet holes and big holes in the walls from grenades.  The second church we went to had 45,000 people buried in the mass graves, and you could go down and see them.  It was very terrible to see and extremely emotional for our group, but truly necessary to greater understand Rwanda as a whole.

Last Sunday, a few of us took taxi’s (my first taxi ride ever!) to a sports club in Kigali to play Ultimate Frisbee.  There’s this team that plays Sunday afternoons and two mornings a week, so we joined their practice.  It was a really fun mix of natives, muzungus from America, some French and English, and probably others that I didn’t mention.  We played three games, and it was a load of fun.  Then this past week I went to the market, ran at the track and played Frisbee at the stadium with Lindsay, played outside our house in the thunderstorm with some girls, played a lot of Dutch Blitz, Speed Solitaire, and Skip Bo, did some homework, and hosted a quiz night with my friend Kim with a mandatory participation policy for the group. Last night we set up a sheet and a projector and had our first movie night- The Lion King!  So Africa.

For my development class we’re taking here, we have to interview NGO’s in Africa and see if they’re doing what they say they’re doing and if development is taking place.  So Friday, Chelsea and I headed to African Evangelical Enterprise for our interview.  BUT, it wasn’t really as easy as we thought it’d be, and we had quite the traditional African Experience.  We didn’t know where we were going, so Mitch, one of our student life coordinators, came with us.  Originally we were supposed to call the man we were interviewing with and he was going to tell our taxi driver where to go, but then we found out that he was at a bank right near our house.  So we walked to the bank, couldn’t find him, called him, and found out we were at the wrong bank.  So we walked to the bank and found him, and he told us we could go wait in his car while he finished up his banking.  The three of us got in the car, and everyone happened to notice three muzungus were sitting in a car.  So first two beggars came to the window, which was really sad, and then this guy tried to sell us a necklace from the window.  The guy kept saying “It’s nice!” and Mitch just responded through the window “I really doubt that’s gold.” Then this guy that worked at the bank came to the window with a huge gun and was like “You need to move your car, the bank car needs to park here” and we were like “ooh, this isn’t our car, we’re just sitting in it.”  All around hilarious.  So then our friend showed up and drove us to our interview, which was really interesting.  They do a ton of work in the community with outreach and he was all about empowering the community, opening their eyes, and showing them that they are able.  He said that they give them knowledge and not money, because that’s the way to combat poverty, which I really thought was important and inspirational.  Then we went to leave and were going to grab a taxi, but someone happened to be leaving their office compound, so we jumped in the car and they dropped us off near our house.  An interesting day for sure.

This morning we took a taxi to African Bagel Company for some breakfast and hanging out (our taxi kept stalling and he had to turn the car off and on while driving 3 times... an interesting drive...).  The food is delicious, and its like muzungu headquarters, which is a strange change of pace to what we’re used to.  It’s nice to get out and about and adventures are a great time.  So hope everyone is doing well! Talk at you soon!

This is a shot I took last week from our road that I just absolutely love.
Such a beautiful view!

This one and the next two were all taken on the way to
the memorials.

This is a picture from ABC Bagels- you can really see both
what a cool place it is with its outdoor seating in the lawn
and also how many white people were there!

Chelsey, Andrea, Meagan (girls from our program who I took
the taxi adventure with) and me outside ABC Bagels. (I look
like a fool in my sunglasses. Oh well, still a cute picture I think)

Got this from Kassi's blog (Thanks Kassi!) of her, Lindsay,
Kim, and I playing outside in the thunderstorm.  I'm
obviously rocking the double thumbs up.